Just Another Manic Monday

The Story So Far: Media-loving boy deprived of the old sources and finding satellite, cable and streaming services a poor substitute becomes his own Programming Director and enjoys it immensely . . . though it is a lot of work. The more tricks he learns and the more content he amasses in-house, the less he misses the ever-growing shallowness of Contemporary “Culture,” of which the quality can best be described by another word beginning with the letter “C.”

And now we re-join our regularly scheduled program, already in progress:

 

When I first started going off the grid with my evening’s entertainment, I quickly realized that Monday Night was going to be critical to my mental well-being.

Monday. The worst day of the week needed to be met head-on with Things That Made Me Happy. Tip No. 1: Pile All of Your Favorite Shows onto Monday Nights!

For me, this meant Comedy, specifically situation comedy, specifically (but not limited to) the British variety. And in the USA, only the most popular of British comedies — your Monty Pythons, your Fawlty Towers and the like — ever got a home video release in any format. Some that did get issued (Are You Being Served, Dad’s Army and The Goodies among them) saw incomplete, inferior or staggered releases.  I was fortunate to have taped a lot of shows off the air during the days when PBS would run such things, but it became evident pretty quickly that if I ever wanted to see anything new-to-me, I would have to find a way to buy and play Region Two disks. The “buy” part was easy enough (because Suited Corporate Bastards will sell you anything), but playing Region 2 disks in the USA is impossible without specialized equipment.

Still, I resisted. It took a show called Last of the Summer Wine to get me to break down and buy a region-free DVD player. And I’m so glad I did.

At 295 episodes, it is the longest-running sitcom in the world. As things go, it’s about as UN-high a concept as you can get: three retired gents spend their days wandering around a cozy Yorkshire town, talking.

That’s it. As the cast filled out, opportunities for the ladies of the town to speak their piece were added; and, most of the time, the more enterprising one of the gents would come up with some hair-brained scheme to get the scruffiest one of the group to publicly embarrass himself. It ran for 37 years. 

I just finished watching series 18, which puts me a little more than halfway through the run. My first significant buy of Region 2 material has already lasted me for years, and without repeat viewings it will remain a centerpiece of my Monday Happy Place for years yet to come. Although I do not look forward to key cast members dying off and being replaced, it’s a strong reminder that life has its trials even in the best of times.

My region 2 player was not satisfied with just that significant dish, and still required regular feeding. One of the first additions was the Complete Collection of The Goodies, a comedy trio with cartoonish sensibilities that make Monty Python look staid and conservative by comparison. From Jimmy Perry and David Croft (creators of Dad’s Army) have come Hi-Di-Hi (hijinks in one of those uniquely English Institutions, the Holiday Camp), It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum (antics of a British “Concert Party” in WWII India; now considered by the BBC to be one the most offensive shows ever made — a thing that I regarded as a particular selling point) and others. 

From Bob Esmonde and John Larbey, creators of the classics Mulberry and The Good Life, comes Brush Strokes, the good-natured saga of a young man who likes the opposite sex rather too much. From Yorkshire Television, the company that gave us a state-of-the-art spy show in The Sandbaggers, comes In Loving Memory starring Dame Thora Hird and Christopher Beeny as a duo of undertakers muddling through in a 1929 mill town.

The versatility of comic star Ronnie Barker (known to Americans primarily as one half of The Two Ronnies) was spelled out to me via two series: Open All Hours (created by Summer Wine’s Roy Clarke) and Porridge (a prison comedy of all things, which turns up often on lists of Britain’s Best Sitcoms). 

And, in the fall season, from Richard Carpenter, creator and main writer for Robin of Sherwood comes The Ghosts of Motley Hall and Catweazle — not so much situation comedies as supernaturally-themed “kid’s shows” with a gentle sense of humor. These entries demonstrate why it’s important to support physical media while you can: they were released by a company called Network, which went belly-up late in 2023, taking an awful lot of British television with them when they died.

It hasn’t all been unmitigated joy: sometimes you come up with a clinker. Mann’s Best Friends was a one-shot-series from Summer Wine’s Roy Clarke with a good concept and a good cast that simply tried too hard. It wasn’t so much about the eccentric and wacky residents of a tiny rooming house as it was about residents who were trying to be eccentric and wacky and failing miserably. Misfires happen when you’re a programming executive, even on the smallest scale. Curry and Chips, another show that attracted my attention for being considered one of the most offensive shows that ever aired, wasn’t so much offensive as ineffective and half-baked.

But the winners have far outnumbered the losers, and one of the nice things about British TV is that the series are so short (typically not running more than 6 to 8 episodes in any given season) that none of them outstay their welcome.

Of course I liberally mix in American series, both new-to-me (for instance, My Favorite Martian, with Ray Walston and Bill Bixby) and Old Favorites. The latter includes a lot of shows that I haven’t seen since their original airdates (Cheers is coming soonish), but occasionally the time comes to revisit perennial classics like M*A*S*H or Gilligan’s Island. Whether new-to-me or not, I dole them out sparingly in six-to-eight week runs, just to pace them. Good as most MTM shows are, they’re better when taken in British measures. I’ve been viewing The Mary Tyler Moore Show in such limited bits that it’s taken me significantly more than a decade to view the first five seasons. No binge-watching for me: These shows were meant to be taken at a rate of no more than once a week. How can anyone appreciate anything when they guzzle it down in gulps as if it were a quart of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream? One thing I’ve learned: when something makes you happy, you want it to last.

Among the re-discoveries? As a very young boy I remember watching re-runs of Car 54, Where Are You?  with Fred Gwynne, Joe E. Ross and Al Lewis. The main impression on me at that age was of course that Gwynne and Lewis were “the same guys in The Munsters.” In my sixties, I was glad to discover that it’s actually a very funny show in its own right about inner city cops, pre-dating Barney Miller by many years. I’ve made its two seasons last about as long as possible: it will be an unhappy day when I run out of episodes sometime this summer.

Next Time: WDUK Tuesday Night at the Movies.

— Thorn.

The Power of Playlists

 

For a long, LONG time, I was content with planning my evening’s entertainment around the DVDs that I had on hand; which, yes, meant removing and inserting disks and waiting for them to load at about half-hour intervals (I don’t “binge-watch” anything, and neither should you). As a child of the broadcast TV era, and an adult of the VHS era, I was accustomed to this. It teaches patience.

It took me an unconscionably long time to figure out how Wifi and digital media could make an evening’s entertainment seamless, and it took even longer for me to realize that iTunes’s Playlist feature could be used just as well for video content as it is for music. This was more than a “lightbulb over the head” moment: it was a door opening.

Away back in the days when I was the night guy/de facto children’s librarian at the library of a small local college, I started hosting a regular “Free Movie Night” for the students, and from the start it was never just a movie. I’ve always been interested in re-creating the kind of full program that movie theaters used to offer their patrons, and so I presented an array of short subjects before the feature: usually a cartoon, a two-reel comedy (Laurel & Hardy or Buster Keaton), and a chapter from an old cliffhanger serial, because that’s what I had on hand.

In those days, it was next to impossible to run a seamless program, without interruptions. In addition to the projector, it required two VHS players, or a VHS and a DVD player, the latter of which was a New Thing then. I would have to cue up the tapes the night before so that they would start at the desired point when I switched them out. With DVDs it was actually harder, even though the quality was better. Because of menus and un-skippable commercials.

In later years, when I had friends over for a movie night, it was still the same challenge, with the same unsatisfactory result: impossible to create a really smooth program. In fact it was a little bit worse, because I’d have to occupy one of the best seats in the house just so that I could reach the players easily.

It wasn’t until about three years or so ago that I discovered the freedom of using playlists in iTunes to arrange the evening’s show. I know, I’m slow on the uptake. But with a small amount of prep, I could pre-load an array of trailers, movie-theater bumpers, short subjects and the feature; at showtime, all I had to do was press “PLAY,” sit back and watch it unfold seamlessly. 

This was a Joy.

From there, the next logical step was to arrange my normal personal evening TV series viewing the same way. Before I moved to town from the country fifteen years ago, I’d never known anything but free broadcast TV. After that, DirecTV was the best option, but I quickly grew tired of paying every month for a bunch of channels that didn’t interest me. The rise of streaming services passed me by; I’d already pulled the plug by then. It wasn’t rocket science to figure out that nobody knows what I want to watch better than me.

I have an older iMac that I’ve converted into my server: and an AppleTV connected to my television, which easily allows me to connect my TV to the computer, and run iTunes directly through my TV. It isn’t the fanciest or slickest set-up, and there are plenty of other ways to do it (and plenty of sources to tell you how), but it’s simple, it works, and I was able to figure it out for myself.

Nowadays, whatever I’m watching, I usually plan the full week’s viewing in advance. I have an array of “station ID” bumpers that I’ve created, and am amassing a growing collection of vintage TV commercials, so that when dinner is over and I sit down for the evening’s entertainment, all I have to do is launch the playlist; what unfolds isn’t particularly authentic, but it is a fair approximation of the style of what prime-time television used to be like when I was growing up. And I’m finding a lot of pleasure in the planning, in being the “Programming Director” of my own virtual station. 

I still buy physical media. In fact, I ONLY buy physical media: digital content can go “poof” too easily, and in too many ways. But every disk that comes into the house is immediately ripped (via MakeMKV and Handbrake) to digital MP4, because it’s that much more convenient. As Monty Python once said, “It’s fun, and only slightly illegal.” 

Over the next few posts, I’ll be walking through my current schedule, the thinking behind it, and the hows of finding and arranging it all. It’s a way of writing about media that goes beyond just what the present day is shoveling down your throat. Hopefully this will be of interest to somebody; perhaps it’ll give you some ideas, and open some doors for others. I’ll be starting with most critial night of the week: the dreaded Monday.

See you there.

—Thorn.

Embracing Your Inner Librarian

 

My father kept a small library in an alcove beside the den, and I used to love standing in there just looking at all the titles, trying to decide what to read, what I could read, and what I would read in the future. Titles that I specifically remember discovering on those shelves were Lost Horizon,  The Flight of The Phoenix, The Plays of Christopher Marlowe, the Poppy Ott adventure series by Leo Edwards (Edward Edison Lee), and Dickens’s Bleak House in the original parts — thank goodness I still have that one on my shelves today!

I was learning to love storytelling and fiction in all its forms at a very young age, and also learning that if you made a place for it in your home, no one could take it away from you.

That was the problem with TV and movies. Not only could they take it away from you, they could prevent you from seeing it in the first place.

At the age of seven, my favorite TV show was a Hanna-Barbera half-hour adventure that combined live action with animation called THE NEW ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Look it up; all I’m going to tell you about it that Ted Cassidy, the actor who played Lurch on THE ADDAMS FAMILY and who appeared on STAR TREK and many other series of the day, was the regular villain; and that I was desperately in love with Lu Ann Haslam, the Older Woman who played Becky Thatcher on the series.

I was in my sixties before I ever was able to watch the entire series. Did it live up to my memories? That’s beside the point.

The point here is that the show aired early on Sunday nights: one of those Time Slots of Death where the network put shows that they were Trying to Kill. The Elephant’s Graveyard for TV shows in the ‘60s. Programming was a game that networks played with millions of dollars at stake, and Sunday nights were the slots of planned Loss Leaders. Because Sunday afternoons were when the football games aired, and if the football game ran over time, “your regularly scheduled program” would be “joined in progress.”

That is, if it aired at all. 

The football game always ran over time. I missed so many episodes of my favorite show, or was forced to join them halfway through, because of those fucking football games.

And so some other things that I learned at a very young age were to hate football with a deep and abiding passion (still with me to this day), and to learn that if you missed your favorite show, you missed it. Shows aired once in those days, maybe twice if you were lucky. Grown-ups would say to you (as they forbade your favorite show because it was past your bedtime or for some other equally dumb-ass and self-serving reason), “You can watch it another time.”

I knew that this was bullshit even before I knew the word “Bullshit.”

In those dark days, every kid knew the rules of television: that TV series had a cumulative effect greater than the sum of their parts, that to everything there is a season, that when it was gone, it was Gone Forever, and as for binge watching, what the hell was that? Even the word didn’t exist yet.

Nowadays of course we live in a world where it’s all Out There, all available, all the time.

Except when it isn’t.

Because the Suited Corporate Bastards who control everything (and who share about equal status with football in my estimation) are always trying to find ways of taking things away from us in the interest of monetization — and preventing us from having anything that they think can’t be monetized.

This is why I’m now quite worried about the preservation and restoration of our silent movie heritage, or for that matter any art or fiction created in or before 1929. It’s all in the Public Domain now; the upshot of which is that the Suited Corporate Bastards will find it harder to bleed money out of any of it.

In the great Ray Bradbury’s still-alarming novel FAHRENHEIT 451, small personal libraries were humanity’s only record of the past, and people became Living Books to preserve literary works from destruction at the hands of the government. That day could still come. That day is closer now than ever. Just sayin’.

Personal libraries are more important today than ever before, and will likely become vital in the near future, unless you are one of those people who will contentedly eat whatever shit you are fed, and smile and say “Give me more of that shit!” 

The whole culture is dying, because everyone who knew how to create it is either dead or disenfranchised. When all the chefs die off or are let go, the food becomes inedible. The same principle applies to culture. Oh, the food will continue to be prepared, but it will be less and less nourishing, less and less flavorful, until we’re all eating Spam.

And yes, there’ll always be that one guy who shouts out, “I’ll eat your Spam! I love it! I’m having Spam eggs bacon Spam Spam Spam and Spam!” If I have to explain that reference to you, all I can say is that you’ve got your cultural work cut out for you.

But riddle me this, Batman. Name one single person working in the industry today who is capable of writing anything even halfway as good as THE PHILADELPHIA STORY. Maybe you’ll have to take time out to track down and watch a copy of THE PHILADELPHIA STORY before you can answer that. That’s okay, I can wait.

You can’t do it. Because they don’t exist.

Thankfully, in 2025, it is easier and more practical than ever before to live in the past. But you’ll need to become your own personal teacher, librarian, programming director and technician to do it. You’ll need to be hunter/gatherer, archeologist, archivist, detective, technician and intrepid cultural explorer. You’ll have to learn to not to be distracted by the obstacles that get thrown in your path, and to not have any age-ist prejudices about the past, how to recognize and follow a lead. 

It’s a lot of work, but there are pleasures to be had, including the pleasure of re-connecting with lost dreams, and the joy of making New Discoveries.

—Thorn.

Dreams and Where to Get Them: Grow Your Own part 3

 

As I type this, I’m in the process of ripping thirty-plus Hopalong Cassidy movies from their DVD source to digital files. The DVDs were the only way I could ever have gotten to see all these pictures, and the price was more than reasonable, but the discs are poorly compiled: the movies were just shoveled onto discs all anyhow, all out of release order, with no attempt made to organize them. With the movies ripped to digital format, I can stream them from my server in their original release order, with no loss of quality (like we used to get when we copied VHS off the air), and because the Cassidy movies all have runtimes of just over an hour I can fill out an evening’s programming with other content that I have, without having to pause to switch out discs or jump from one player to another. Behold the supremacy of physical media combined with the the power of digital playlists!

If I’d been paying for a streaming service . . . First of all, I don’t know of a streaming service that offers the complete catalog of Hopalong Cassidy westerns; second I’d be at their mercy for  having to view the pictures (probably riddled with commercials) within their time frame, before their rights ran out and the movies got removed; and third I’d have had to pay out a LOT more money, paying the service every single month for a mess of content that I don’t care about in order to access what I want. This way I have Hopalong’s whole ouvre at my fingertips, in my collection, whenever I want to view them — and the suited corporate bastards CAN’T take them away from me!

It should be clear by now that if you don’t have at least a little bit of the Librarian / Collector in your blood, or if you’re one of those people who’s so very very contemporary in your mindset that you can’t stomach anything that was made longer ago than last year, this series of posts is Not For You. 

However if you agree with Peter Bogdanovich that “There are no old movies; just movies that you haven’t seen,” then it’s my hope that something I type here might possibly help you along your journey. 

And if you think of yourself as a film enthusiast but you don’t know who Peter Bogdanovich is, what the hell is the matter with you? Were you raised in a barn? Go out and LOOK HIM UP! Cheezits, what do you think the internet is FOR?

That last point maybe needs to be clarified. Because of course if you’re a young person who didn’t live through it, you can’t be expected to know history by osmosis. But you should have enough curiosity in you to find out. Don’t just say “OH, I don’t know about PAPER MOON or THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, they happened before I was born!” Of course they did, moron. But the stuff is out there. Go out, track them down, research them and WATCH THEM. Nobody blames you for the accident of your birth, but if you have no curiosity about things — that I do blame you for. KING KONG, Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, The Marx Brothers, THE WIZARD OF OZ and the Universal monster movies were made a long time before I was born, but that didn’t stop me from filling my head with their goodness at the earliest opportunity!

Also, I had the advantage of growing up in a world that was not yet glutted with content. Just three networks, and maybe three or four local affiliates who filled out their broadcast day with syndicated reruns and packages of old movies. I also had a father who shared with me his love of ’30s comedians, and access to publications like THE MONSTER TIMES and Forry Ackerman’s FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, both of which which helped feed my taste for horror movies made in a time before they became really horrible.

So add my voice to the growing chorus: Physical Media, Physical Media, Physical Media. It is the Great Savior of the film buff. Much more economical than any streaming service, plus it puts the power of choice into your hands. If you don’t like the space that it takes up, or don’t have space for it to take up, you can always rip it to digital files, as I described above. Of course this is just one of the reasons why the suited corporate bastards don’t like physical media and don’t want you to have it, and why we must keep buying it. MakeMKV is a really useful little app for converting discs to digital files without loss in quality. You can find it here: https://www.makemkv.com, and if you need instructional videos on how to use it, there are several on YouTube. Connect a disc player to your computer, slide in a disc and you’re off to the races. If you need the files in some other file format than MKV (iTunes won’t play anything other than mp4 Or m4v), then another great little app called Handbrake (https://handbrake.fr) is here to make the conversions.

You already know where to find physical media. Hell fire, your local library probably has a lot of it on loan! If you’re buying, as an alternative to Amazon, you might try www.deepdiscount.com. Critic’s Choice and VCI are two other good sources, and both are publishers as well as retailers, so buying from them encourages future releases. 

But somewhere along the way you are going to discover the value of having digital files in-house that you store on your own media; either discs, a hard drive or a NAS. When that happens, you will want to start exploring the regions of the utterly VAST vaults of the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/). I visit them frequently, and never fail to make a Happy Discovery or three — like for instance, a restored-from-35mm-print of Richard Williams’s vastly under-appreciated animated classic RAGGEDY ANN AND ANDY, in the original widescreen (never issued to home video), available to watch online or download to your system, here: https://archive.org/details/raggedy-ann-andy-a-musical-adventure-1977-35mm-ultra-hd_202307/

And — if your appetite for film, TV and music is as voracious as mine, somewhere along the way you’ll run into something called torrenting. I’m not here to tell you that you should do it, I’m not here to tell you how to do it, but I will say this much: get a VPN. You will need it. I use NordVPN, but it’s in no way a paid promotion, so you’ll have to search on it.

Anyway — searching is a good habit to get into. Don’t know the answer? Not a problem and not a kick against you. You know where to find the answer, and that’s literally All That Matters. Search, search. Search. How else do you learn? How else do you make Wonderful Discoveries? And no matter when you were born, or where your interests lie, Wonderful Discoveries are what it’s all about. 

—Thorn.

Bits and Bobs: Grow Your Own, Part Two

 

There’s a fellow over on YouTube who found a way to recreate Twentieth-Century-style television in his own home. As I understand it, he populated a server with three different playlists offering three full sets of content, operating live and independently, and then plugged it into a vintage analog television. While I’d never go this far, it does show what’s possible using everyday tech that we didn’t have access to back then, with a little ingenuity and some programming skills. Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/k_BkD85yIg0?si=8WhzrqTXJUcJruQG

He managed on a much grander scale what I’ve been doing for the past decade and a half: acting as the Programming Director for my own imaginary TV station. This currently involves gathering,  planning and implementing three hours of entertainment every night, the equivalent of what used to be considered Prime Time back in the day.

It didn’t start that way, but the writing went up on the wall back in the early ‘80s with the introduction of home video machines: VHS and Betamax. I was an early adopter, or as early as I could afford to be. It was the Big Game-Changer for we the Great TV-viewing public: suddenly we were no longer at the mercy of the Big Three all-powerful TV networks (plus PBS). Not only could we decide what we wanted to watch when we wanted too watch it, but we could preserve our favorite television series and films so that they would always be there for us when we wished (and had the time) to revisit them.

The concept of the private individual as video librarians had never really occurred to professional TV programmers until that day — but some of us were already well-acquainted with keeping personal libraries of the books we read and the the records we loved and the comics that we gathered. Adding TV and Movies into the mixture was a natural. The introduction of DVD turned the trickle of home video enthusiasts into an explosion. And I guess the point of this longish ramble is that if you’re going to take on the responsibility of being your own Programming Director, it helps if you already have that Librarian Instinct, and you’ve been Gathering Material for a long while. That’s part of the job that never stops. 

I don’t have to tell you that cable and networks and streaming services are crap, and Expensive Crap at that. It’s something I hear all the time. What you should know is that you don’t need them. What you should know is that no one understands what you like better than you do, and nothing is more satisfying than arranging your life by your own design. Whatever that means to you. In the area of video entertainment, paying for streaming services is far and away the least cost-effective way of doing it. 

I lost access to free over-the-air TV when I moved into town from the country in 2010. This was a blow, as I’d lived all my life with free over-the-air TV.  For a while, I tried filling the gap with a DirecTV subscription; but this was really unsatisfactory for reasons that you’re all probably familiar with. Oh, I found a few things to watch, even discovered some new things — but I also found that the old reliable DVDs, and then Blu-Rays, and then digital files streamed in my own house from my own computer, served me better. 

I now have a set-up that relies on all three, plus the odd free service such as YouTube. It’s a set-up that I figured out for myself, over a long time; and though it’s hardly the state of the art, it works for me. Your mileage may vary, and there are plenty of tech-savvy channels and articles out there to show you what’s the latest and greatest. My interest doesn’t particularly lie in the tech side of things, and it’s not what I’m going to be focusing on in this series, but you’re going to need something akin to these basics at the start:

• A television and sound system that’s right for your space
• A blu-ray player
• A region-free DVD player (very important!)
• A TV steaming box (I use AppleTV, but any will work so long as they offer the ability to connect to your server)
• A dedicated server computer. If you have an older computer that you’ve retired for everyday use, it will be perfect for this purpose. It doesn’t have to be the best and the brightest. It just has to run.
• Home Wi-fi.
• On the software side you will need installed on your server (or TV box or both) some kind of media player: Itunes and Infuse are the two I use.
• And most important: Time, plenty of it, and the librarian’s dedication and curiosity to sniff out the programming that tickles your fancy wherever it may be.

Here’s a tech link that I found helpful: https://theaterdiy.com/how-to-set-up-a-media-server-for-a-home-theater/

Connect your TV to the speakers, the disc players and the box, make sure the Wifi is up and running, connect the box to your server computer, and you’re ready to roll — that’s all the tech I know or care about. The only thing needed now is to take responsibility for the Programming. 

Because just as it’s true that You Are What You Eat, it’s also true that You Are What You Put into your Eyes and Ears and Brain, and you need to feed yourself a Balanced Diet. You wouldn’t walk down the street picking up and eating any piece of trash that you saw, would you? The same is true for content. And creating the daily menu is a job that will suck up just as many hours as you care to throw at it.  

The good news is that you have all of History to choose from, without limit. Over the next few installments I’m going to post links to resources, providing examples, discussing the history of broadcast entertainment and going over my own weekly schedule in detail. I hope you’ll follow me down this odd Road of Yellow Bricks. If you do, I’ll be the Man Behind the Curtain at journey’s end.

—Thorn.